I'm just curious: Is there a big difference (performance-wise) between a 5400 RPM drive and 7200 RPM drive?

(I know there will be some because faster is usually better, but am curious if it is worth the extra money to buy a 7200 RPM drive versus 5400 RPM drive.)

Also, is there any problem using a laptop (2.5") SATA drive in a desktop computer (I have a 2.5-to-3.5 adaptor and a spare drive). My reasoning is that I have a spare 2.5 laptop SATA drive and my main desktop drive died the other day, so I was thinking of using the laptop drive in the desktop for the time being (to save money).

The laptop drive has an 8MB cache, which is what my other system drive had. Except for my desktop drive was a 7200 RPM and the laptop drive is only a 5400 RPM.

I'm just curious: Is there a big difference (performance-wise) between a 5400 RPM drive and 7200 RPM drive?

If all else being equal (cache size, number of platters, etc.) then yes, there is a noticeable difference that can be perceived without the use of benchmarking utilities.

cbassett01 wrote:

I know there will be some because faster is usually better, but am curious if it is worth the extra money to buy a 7200 RPM drive versus 5400 RPM drive.

Only you can answer that as it comes down to two choices: would you rather have longer notebook battery life, or would you rather see more system performance? Personally, for notebook use, I prefer 5,400RPM hard drives mainly due to the fact that they consume less power. 7,200RPM hard drives perform better but they consume much more power than their 5,400RPM counterparts. It's whatever you feel is more important for your laptop needs.

cbassett01 wrote:

Also, is there any problem using a laptop (2.5") SATA drive in a desktop computer (I have a 2.5-to-3.5 adaptor and a spare drive).

Nope, there is no problem using laptop hard drives in a desktop solution. However, you need to understand that laptop HDD capacities cap out at 500GB, so you aren't going to see the insane capacities that Seagate and Western Digital have acheived in 3.5" hard drives in 2.5" HDD formfactor.

Um, people?
From my read on the OP, there's not a question of mounting the drive - he has a drivebay adapter for the notebook drive (I think. @ cbassett: that's a drivebay adapter that you have, yes? Not an IDE adapter?)
And, since it's SATA, the electrical connections are the same.
The only question is "will there be a performance hit?"

Answer: yes. Slower spindle speeds = slower read/write speeds. Simple as that.
But, you will be up & running. FWIW, though, hard drives are way cheap these days - you can get a 500GB desktop drive for less than $100.

The only question is "will there be a performance hit?" Answer: yes. Slower spindle speeds = slower read/write speeds.

This was already established previously in the thread.

Aware of that. However, of the four people that resonded:
- one only hit on mounting, and did not address the real question;
- one did address (a little) performance, and beat on mounting;
- one leaned his answer towards laptopland
- one linked to a thread that had already answered the question.

I didn't do any benchmarking, but just from casual observation, I really can't see much improvement in speed or performance. In fact, when doing things like viewing photos & videos, or launching software, I don't think I can tell any difference at all. Perhaps it's due to the netbook's slow processor. Things might be different with a notebook (not netbook).

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